In the Vicinity of the Land of the Almost: The Stylistics of Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter  

Oleh:

Matos, Nicole

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 44 no. 1 (Mar. 2009), page 81-99.
Topik: Jamaica Kincaid; Mr. Potter; Caribbean; stylistics; parataxis; subjunctive
Fulltext: In the Vicinity of the Land of the Almost.pdf (161.01KB)

Isi artikel

This article offers a reading of Kincaid’s most stylistically convoluted novel, Mr. Potter, reconnecting its paratactic structures to the numbing emptiness of Roderick Potter’s inner world. Commenting on Kincaid’s earlier novel Lucy (1990), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak identified “paratactic” and “subjunctive” modes as crucial to Kincaid’s style, linking the weak connectives of paratactic grammar to the characters’ affective withdrawal and alienation. An equal synergy of form and content is marked, I suggest, in the fl imsy connectives that “attach” Mr. Potter to his context and refl ect his own tragically indifferent attachments. But more remarkably, these same paratactic structures also open Mr. Potter into the subjunctive space of narrative redress – the posited world of rewritten histories; of textually incarnate regrets, conjectures and desires. The parataxis of Mr. Potter thus emerges not as nihilism, but as a means for constructing and sustaining alternate realities, a “land of the almost” to supplement the land of the real.

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